I have been trying to obtain the time at which the content of an .xlsx file was created without any success so far. I can track the much-desired information on Windows either through File Properties -> Details -> Origin -> Content created, or by opening the Excel file and navigating to File -> Info -> Related Dates -> Created.
I was hoping that I would be able to obtain this information through openxlsx but while I am able to track down the creators by using the getCreators() function there does not appear to exist a similar function for the time.
I have also tried the file.info() function but it won't cut it as mtime, ctime, and atime all point to the time of the download.
Any help would be much appreciated!
I don't think openxlsx is going to do it for you, but you might want to submit a FR for them to add/extend file metadata availability. Here's something in a pinch, assuming that the XLSX file is in a newer zip-based format and not the previous binary format.
myfile <- "path/to/yourfile.xlsx"
docProps <- xml2::read_xml(unz(myfile, "docProps/core.xml"))
docProps
# {xml_document}
# <coreProperties xmlns:cp="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/package/2006/metadata/core-properties" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:dcmitype="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
# [1] <dc:creator>r2</dc:creator>
# [2] <cp:lastModifiedBy>r2</cp:lastModifiedBy>
# [3] <dcterms:created xsi:type="dcterms:W3CDTF">2021-05-09T20:01:41Z</dcterms:created>
# [4] <dcterms:modified xsi:type="dcterms:W3CDTF">2021-05-10T00:14:14Z</dcterms:modified>
xml2::xml_text(xml2::xml_find_all(docProps, "dcterms:created"))
# [1] "2021-05-09T20:01:41Z"
It's a text file, so in a pinch you can look at it manually, but I recommend not trying to do regex on XML in general. (You could get away with it here, but it's still fraught with peril.)